Apple released the first iPad almost exactly two years ago, literally jump-starting a market for consumer tablets and associated software and services that's now worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Along the way, the company has generated some very interesting facts and figures for folks looking to suss out what went rightand how to potentially bottle Apple's recipe for tablet success.

Dutch research firm Distimo spends all of its time tracking the mobile apps that are developed for and distributed through Apple's online App Store properties and similar marketplaces run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and others. Now, on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the very first iPad, Distimo analyst Gert Jan Spriensma has offered up a comprehensive review of Apple's methods for growing its base of apps available for the tablet through three generations of iPads.

In crunching the numbers for iPad apps, Spriensma and the Distimo team has to work with two categories of applications. There are apps built specifically for the tablet, but there also "universal" apps that also work on the iPhone. The App Store for iPad was home to 180,000 apps as of February, according to the research firm, comprising about 60,000 iPad-only apps and roughly 120,000 universal apps (the rate at which universal apps are being added to the App Store is currently outpacing the addition of iPad-only apps, Distimo found).

What's more, there are further app sub-categories to reckon withpaid apps versus free apps, apps with in-app purchase functionality versus those without, etc. The upshot is that with the App Store for iPad, Apple has built up a tablet app ecosystem in record time, growing the number of available tablet apps at a level that far outpaces the rate that Microsoft has been able to add smartphone apps in its 18-month-old Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, for example.

Hoping to divine "best practices" for the development of an online store for tablet apps, Spriensma found that Apple's App Store for iPad has grown along similar lines as the App Store for iPhone did before it, but with some key differences.

For example, it turns out that iPad apps feature the ability to make in-app purchases more often than iPhone apps do. Distimo reports that 10 percent of all iPad apps use in-app purchases, as compared with 6 percent of iPhone apps (and just 2 percent of all apps in Google Play, the recently rebranded online store for content and Android apps that was formerly called the Android Market).

Among the top 200 highest-grossing apps for the iPad listed by Apple, the percentage featuring in-app purchases climbs all the way to 74 percent.

Distimo also discovered that iPad users are apparently very willing to pony up real money for content provided by premium content sources. In the U.S. market, the top 100 highest-grossing apps in the App Store for iPad's Newsstand category, led by such well-established brands as The New York Times and the New Yorker, are pulling in more than $70,000 a day just six months after the category was launched, according to Spriensma.

That said, as with apps for non-tablet devices, free apps still outpace paid apps in terms of downloads per app in the Weather, Newsstand, and Entertainment categories in the App Store for iPad.

And the U.S. no longer sets the pace for downloading free iPad apps. In February, Chinese users downloaded on average 1.1 million free iPad apps from the App Store's top 300 list per day, while iPad users in the U.S. managed just under a million.

Still, Distimo noted that the U.S. remains the best target market for developers of paid apps, while "[t]he top countries that developers should aim for if they have a one-off or in-app strategy aside from the US are Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom."

What it all means is that Apple now has easily the largest tablet app store on the market. In fact, the App Store for iPad is the third-largest online mobile app distributor of any kind, trailing just its own App Store for iPhone and Google Play.

About the Author

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Ch... See Full Bio

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